News

The Anne's Vans story

23rd February 2019

Posted byAnne

We are in Wales for the weekend. Not in one of our vw campervans though. We are down for a family birthday celebration and it coincides with the Wales v England rugby. My husband is Welsh so I’d better keep quiet. The point of the story though is not the rugby or the birthday it’s about how we got into the vw campervan rental business.

A few years ago we thought to ourselves “wouldn’t it be a great idea to buy an old VW campervan and go off touring”. There was only one problem with this idea. Neither of us had ever been in one. The good ones are not cheap to buy and if we went ahead and bought one and found out that we really didn’t like it after all that could be a very expensive mistake.

No problem we thought. Let’s just hire one and then we can decide. It must however have already been June, ie well into the season, and try as we might we couldn’t find any availability for love nor money. Eventually we compromised and hired a brand new one from a company in Nottingham. We had a great week at Hillend Campsite on the Gower peninsula (hence the Welsh connection) and decided that we loved the campervan life. The week in Wales really tested our resolve as towards the end of it a storm blew in and totally destroyed our gazebo. This was added to a growing pile of broken gazebos that were clearly not built for the rigours of the Welsh weather.

So we got home and decided to buy a campervan and rent it out when we weren’t using it which would be most of the time. The idea was that renting the campervan would help pay for its maintenance and upkeep which for vintage vans we figured could be costly. If nobody wanted to rent it then we still had a vw campervan for our own use and which we thought would retain its value.

That winter after a couple of abortive purchase attempts (people think their own vans are worth a lot more than they really are) we eventually found one in great Yarmouth that suited our purpose and campervan Betty became ours. The rest, as they say, is history.

We built our website and came up with the name Anne’s Vans (after toying with all sorts of names like Lincoln campervan hire, Lincolnshire VW campervan rentals and so on). Campervan Betty became very popular so we decided to buy another, Bertie and the stable expanded :)

Our plan is at some point to buy another but you can’t rush these things. You have to wait for the right one to come along. So there you go. The story of how Anne’s Vans became a Lincoln based VW campervan hire business. Nuff said :)